The Ashley Bryan School

Serving Children in Grades K-8 from the Cranberry Isles

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

How Our Garden Grows!

Last spring, the students of the Islesford Schoolbegan working on a school garden. After a very difficult growing season, we realized the garden needed help. With the help of Eliza Greenman, Becka Gange, many community members we enriched the soil by sheet mulching the beds.Sheet mulching is also known as composting in place and lasagna gardening. It involves layering different forms of carbon and nitrogen on top of the garden beds. After adding many layers of manure, seaweed, food scraps, leaves, and grass clippings to each of the beds, we covered each pile with cardboard and newspaper. Finally we added another layer of seaweed and grass clippings to suppress weeds. We're hopeful that our soil will be in much better shape and full of worms in the spring! We'll be studying Colonial America in the spring. Should we try to plant a colonial garden? What would we plant in a colonial garden? What should we plant?

I really enjoyed choosing what foods and flowers we wanted, and where to put them. It was also really fun to look at seed catalogs and pick the variety of the different foods and flowers we wanted, and thinking, "Do we want purple potatoes or normal?" It was also fun to see how different the varieties of the same food can be. I think altogether it was just a really fun project!

I think that doing a colonial garden is a really good idea! I remember when we did our colonial day, and how fun that was! I think what we would grow would depend on what we learned, and all the other things you have to consider when you start a garden!